Facebook Improves Chat's Stability And Speed; Kills Support for IE6

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According to a blog post today on the company’s site, Facebook is revamping its Chat feature to be faster, more stabilized and reliable.

Facebook says that Chat, which launched two years ago, is now one of the most widely used communication features on the network. In the next few weeks, Facebook will “be making important improvements in the way connections are established and messages are sent.”

Of course, one of the results of the improvements, says Facebook engineer Rodrigo Schmidt, is that Chat will not be supported on older browsers, particularly on IE6. Support for IE6 will be discontinued on Sept. 15. IE6 has pretty much been laid to rest, even by Microsoft, so it’s not surprising that Facebook will no longer continue support for the dated browser. Recent reports show that IE6 usage has fallen to only 4.7 percent, but Facebook still has to give users time to upgrade to new browser.

Earlier this year, Facebook launched support for Jabber/XMPP, an open protocol that made it easy for any chat client or web service to integrate Facebook Chat.